eBay killed the Car Boot Sale

One of the annoying aspects of the rising success of eBay, is the fact that it has effectively killed off the Car Boot Sale.  I'm not kidding.  Pick up your local free paper sometime.  Normally I pick it up just long enough to remove it from the doormat and deposit it in the bin, and I'd imagine you do the same, but next time actually open it and you'll see that, whereas once it seemed that every local farmer and owner of a large car park had placed an ad announcing that they were throwing open their gates to make a few quid on hosting a Car Boot, now those adverts have all gone.  Disappeared.  Lost forever.

Not that I am advocating the practice of getting up (usually unnaturally early, "to get the bargains") on a weekend and trudging to a muddy field to gawp at an endless amount of stalls filled with tatty china figurines - hell, no.  No, regular visitors to Car Boots are most definitely a danger to national security and their local community, as they are quite clearly utterly bonkers. 

However, despite the fact that you probably had to haggle with these nutters ("Oh come on mate, it's only 50p, stop being such a tight-arse.  Are you going to buy it or not"), which does mean talking to them and looking at them without staring (which cannot be easy).  The car boot surely must have been a great way to get rid of a lot of your unwanted stuff in a single day.  Would you reach the wider market that eBay opens up to you?  Definitely not.  So would you make as much profit as you would if you sold your tat via an online auction?  Very doubtful indeed. 

But.. there are limits to how useful eBay can be..
No, really there are..
Listen..
I have a spare room that needs emptying of a heck of a lot of stuff.. old books (some in pristine condition due to the fact that I quite often used to go on massive spending spree's in Waterstones (Damn their tempting 3 for 2 offers) but would never actually quite get round to reading all of my purchases), old CDs, old games consoles, etc, etc.. Now listing each one of these items on eBay would, quite frankly, be a pain in the arse.. not to mention the fact that I'd then have to keep an eye on when all of these auctions finished, no doubt have to trudge down to my bank to pay in cheques 'cos some inconsiderate bastards out there still refuse to use PayPal (and I've not been inside my branch for over 12 months now, and that's a habit I don't really care to change), then get jiffy bags, write on jiffy bags, and then carry jiffy bags to post office to ship jiffy bags to winning bidders..

All in all, a massive faff.. 
There's also the fact that a person would buy, say, a second hand book at a boot sale even if it is a little dog-eared and the spine's a bit bent.  As long as it closely resembles a book and the final page, where the killer is revealed in dramatic circumstances, is not missing then it's fair game.  But in online auctions expectations about the condition of second hand items are frigging ridiculous.  Unless the item has been vacuum sealed from the moment of purchase, and was only purchased by using tongs to carry the item to the cashier so that it was untouched by human hands at any point during the transaction, people won't even bother to click on the item you're selling. 

Arrgghh - nightmare.
So unless someone can come up with a third option I am currently stuck with a room full of stuff that I am too attached to to just skip, but cannot be attached to enough to keep.  If anyone has an ideas as to what the third option could be (an option which would, preferably, still see me with a couple of quid in my back pocket - still have marriage to pay for and baby on the way), then I'd be very, very interested to hear it.

Laters..